Should You Really Preach Proverbs 31 on Mother's Day?

Can you count the number of sermons you've heard on Proverbs 31 on Mother's Day? Maybe you've preached a few yourself?

Don't get me wrong, Proverbs 31 is a great passage.

However, when you poke around in the top Google results for "Proverbs 31 mother's day sermons" (as I did), you find a lot of sermons that try to encourage mothers by treating this passage like it is an instruction list for mothers. And, separately, I have had many experiences of Christian women bristling when Proverbs 31 is mentioned, seeing it more as a bludgeon than a blessing.

Is Proverbs 31 about motherhood? Short answer: No. It's a poetic portrait of wisdom, not a checklist for mothers. Because of this, it's easy to do more harm than good. So, if you are thinking of preaching on it, how can you do it well and maybe even undo some of the harm that has been done in the past?

This is the first of a pair of posts on Mother's Day preaching. In this post, we'll explain how preaching on Proverbs 31 goes wrong and some ways to do it better. In the following post, we'll look at Biblical characters we think are even better to preach about on Mother's Day.

(Quotes from ESV unless stated otherwise.)

A Deadly Trap for the Careless Pastor

​​As popular as this passage is for Mother's Day preaching, it just isn't about motherhood. The woman in the passage is a mother and she receives praise from her husband and children. But it's not a teaching on motherhood. In fact, it's not even really directly addressed to women.

And, if you needed no other indication that something is amiss when we commend women to be "Proverbs 31 women," just look at the passage. This woman's lifestyle would kill her.

What do I mean? This wife in this poem runs a full household—not a nuclear family—it's much more like a working ranch than a house in the suburbs. She provides the family with food, she buys a vineyard, she plants the vineyard, she sells things in town and she makes things to sell at night, she provides for the poor, and that’s only some of what she’s said to do.

All-in-all, she’s wise and industrious and praised by everyone. Until she drops stone dead.

Because, if we look at this as a literal description, “She rises while it is yet night” (31:15) to provide food for everyone and then, in 31:18, in the context of her work with the distaff and spindle, “Her lamp does not go out at night.” Human beings have to sleep. If they don’t, they keel over. Kaput.

A King's Counsel

So, this doesn’t sound very wise for a wisdom book. But when we take context and genre into account, it makes a little more sense: this isn't written to women and it isn't meant to be taken literally. That's not the point.

Our first clue is that the first verse of this chapter tells us,

The words of King Lemuel. An oracle that his mother taught him.

So, the king is offering this, but it is his mother's advice to him as a young prince. The beginning is more about general wisdom for a king. This fits with the address from a parent to a son earlier in Prov. 1:8 (father and mother to a son) and 7:1 & 24 (father to sons).

Verse 10 begins the section about the wife:

An excellent wife who can find?
She is far more precious than jewels.

So, we have to acknowledge something right off the bat: Even if this is meant to be a literal criteria for "an excellent wife," it is an excellent wife for a king (or at least a prince). The stakes for a nation are much higher than for any ordinary person. (It's probably no accident that this is in a book traditionally attributed to Solomon!)

So, even if it is meant to be taken literally at all, it is not for ordinary women in your church on Mother's Day. But I don't think that it's even meant literally for the wives of kings and princes.

That is because Proverbs 31:10-31 mirrors a contrast from the beginning of the book that is not itself literal. The contrast here isn't between an industrious wife and a super-duper-self-destructively-industrious wife. It’s between wisdom and folly. This is the end of the book, so it makes sense to look at the beginning and see if there’s some sort of “framing” going on.

Lady Wisdom vs. Folly

And there absolutely is. 

Without doing a deep dive into the structure of the first nine chapters of Proverbs, the book begins (in Prov. 1:7) by declaring that the “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (NIV or “knowledge” in ESV). That's echoed in Prov. 31:30. This section also shares the structure of wise advice from a parent from their parent (see 1: 8 and 4:1-4). Throughout the opening chapters, we get contrasts between wisdom and folly, and between two kinds of women. Folly is a temptress who appeals to youthful lusts but leads to destruction, while Wisdom warns and promises prosperity and happiness. The wife of Proverbs 31 looks a lot like wisdom in the opening of this book.

This leads into a second point about genre. The opening chapters of Proverbs is not just straightforward practical advice. Instead, they paint everything in the starkest and over-the-top colors. Big contrasts are part of the persuasive and motivating goal of these chapters. This makes sense. Having been a youth, a youth is likely to be tempted to make rash, hormonal decisions. Proverbs wants to point out: don't touch the stove—it will burn you. It’s not about setting out strict rules for the youth. It’s more about helping the youth see how badly things go if they don’t cultivate and act from wisdom.

Again, if the life of the woman in Proverbs 31 is self-destructive if taken literally… it must not be meant literally. This means that a better reading of the wise wife in Proverbs 31 is that it is intentionally over the top. It’s a poem that is trying to teach. She is the direction in which the young man should aim (and not the adulteresses associated with Folly). 

Finally, let's return to the point about this not being for just any son, but a king’s son, not everyone, everywhere. The woman in this story is the head of a wealthy household (she absolutely has staff). Her virtues are those of someone with privilege. She doesn't take it for granted or just please herself. Instead, she spreads around the wealth, serving rather than being served. Her life was unattainable for 99% of women in her day—much less those of ours.

Better Ways to Preach Proverbs 31

On this interpretation, simply holding up Proverbs 31 and saying, this is what a great mother looks like... that puts a crushing (even lethal) load of responsibility on mothers and tops it off with a Biblical mandate. It's not just your view about what a mother should do, it's God's. So, do it, even if it's really really hard.

Liberate Mothers From a Bad Reading

If there are women in your congregation who feel Proverbs 31 as a burden, showing that those earlier readings of this text were incorrect is good news. Beyond that, you may liberate some women from their feeling that they cannot live up to this model.

That may be reason enough to return to this passage on Mother's Day. But can we say anything positive?

Making the Most of the Time

Though the picture of the wise woman is over the top, the contrast being drawn between folly and wisdom remains. It is applicable here, both for men and women, mothers and non-mothers.

The woman in this portrait makes the most of her time. She has thought about where her effort will make a difference and acts on it. She does so through every sphere of life: family, business, agriculture, and in charity. She embodies wisdom.

And—this isn't a gendered teaching, as if women have to be smart with their time, but men can just watch football. Making wise use of your time is behind the entirety of the book of Proverbs. That makes it universal.

Elevating the Fear of the Lord

When we look at the framing created by the opening of the book of Proverbs and its ending, a term stand out: "the fear of the Lord." In Proverbs 1:7, we learned that it was "the beginning of wisdom." In Proverbs 31, it is the ultimate crown placed upon the woman being described: “Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised” (31:30).

Wisdom begins with the fear of the Lord. Proverbs makes it clear that it is the foundation of a good life, a life of shalom. It is so for men. It is is so for women. It is a foundation we can all build upon, and on Mother's Day, that is the message parents can pass down to their children.

The message to the young man in Proverbs 31:30 goes a little further and is applicable for men and women, as well: "charm is deceitful and beauty is vain." In the first instance, this fits with the description of folly in the beginning of Proverbs as a seductress.

In our culture charm and looks are elevated to a level that an ancient Israelite king could not imagine. Beyond even the easy availability of pornography in our day, we are bombarded by images that portray beautiful, charming people to entice us to buy, subscribe, or just keep scrolling. The fear of the Lord, virtue, wisdom, self-sacrifice—the things we should be elevating—they are literally "not sexy."

For women, and mothers in particular, there is incredible pressure to not only raise children, work outside the home, but to also conform to beauty standards that are wholly unrealizable for most people. This is getting even worse in a world where filters distort our perception of what normal human beings even look like.

Proverbs 31 speaks to this. The foundation of the virtues of the woman is her fear of the Lord. This is the attainable part of the picture of the wise woman in this chapter. And it is not unique to the woman, either. Wisdom begins, for men and women, in exactly the same place.

Other Passages for Mother's Day

Maybe the best choice is not to preach on Proverbs 31 at all. There are many interesting mothers in Scripture whose stories are worth considering. Your best option is one you already know, but probably don't preach about often: Mary, the mother of Jesus. We explain why she's a mother we shouldn't overlook!